The Newsroom blog

16 posts categorized "Archives"

The British Library is currently engaged on a major programme entitled Heritage Made Digital. The aim of the programme is to transform digital access to the British Library's heritage collections by streamlining digitisation workflows, undertaking strategically led digitisation and making existing digitised content available as openly as copyright and licensing agreements allow. Heritage Made Digital is embracing a wide range of materials, from manuscripts through to sounds, and one of its major elements is newspapers.

Unfit newspaper volumes awaiting conservation inspection

The first thing to ask is why the British Library needs to be digitising newspapers, when we already have a very productive relationship with family history company Findmypast, which selects and digitises newspapers for the British Newspaper Archive, providing us with digital preservation copies in the process. It has digitised over 20 million pages from our collection, and adds hundreds of thousands of extra pages each month.

The simple answer is that there is more that we would like to see digitised that isn't likely to get digitised soon otherwise. The greater part of newspapers processed by Findmypast come from our microfilmed copies, because it is so much easier and quicker to do so (about eighteen times quicker than digitising from print). But only a third of our collection of some 60 million newspaper issues has been microfilmed. Of the newspapers for which we have only print, some get digitised, but many do not. In part this is because of the condition of many of newspapers, often produced using low-quality newsprint and for many years not stored in optimum conditions. We define preservation status of our newspapers under three categories: good, poor and unfit. Unfit no one gets to see, even onsite, unless we have a microfilm or digital access version. And around 4.5% of our collection (or 20 million pages) is in an unfit state and with no microfilmed or digitised copy available. That's a lot of newspapers not to be making available at all.

So, for Heritage Made Digital, we have chosen to concentrate on newspapers in a poor or unfit condition. This is not as straightforward as it might sound, since few runs of a newspaper title (i.e. from its first date to its last date) exist under one condition status. One volume may be good, another poor, another unfit (e.g. with a broken spine, crumbling pages etc). Therefore, although we want to concentrate on poor or unfit newspapers, we also want to digitise full runs of newspaper titles, because this will make best sense for researchers. In practice, we find that 40% of the volumes we are digitising for Heritage Made Digital are in a poor or unfit state.

We have set other restrictions for ourselves, with the aim of offering the best result for the widest range of research users. We are only digitising newspapers that are out of copyright, so that we can make the results freely available online - both the digitised pages and the data created by digitisation. Calculating when a newspaper goes out of copyright is complicated, but we are sticking to a 140-year rule - so the run of the newspaper has to have ended by 1878.

Next, we are primarily digitising newspapers that we published in London but which were distributed outside London as well. So, not newspapers for the areas of London only (i.e. London regionals), but metropolitan newspapers with a wider circulation. Curiously enough, this is a neglected area for newspaper digitisation. The British Newspaper Archive focusses heavily on British regional newspapers, while the main UK national newspapers available digitally are almost entirely those where the title still exists (e.g. The Guardian, The Times). In other words, we have identified a gap, one which we think will make a significant difference to what is available online so far.

We are not in competition with Findmypast, however - in fact, we are working closely with them. Every newspaper that we digitise will be made freely available via the British Library's catalogue, but they will also be made available via the British Newspaper Archive (a subscription site). That means that almost all of our digitised newspapers will be searchable - by title, date and word - in the one place. As things stand, the newspapers will be appearing on the BNA first, and secondly (at a date still to be determined) through the British Library catalogue, using the Universal Viewer display tool (a development project still in progress).

Waiting to be digitised

So, what are we digitising?

It will be around 1.3 million pages, 1 million from print and another 300,000 from microfilm. We're still choosing the titles to digitise, even as we start digitising, as we find out more through a process of preservation need and research, but it will be somewhere around 180 newspaper titles, many of them short runs of a year or less. We can't provide a definitive list as yet, but these are some of the titles (with title changes) that have gone to our imaging studios already:

The News / The News and Sunday Herald / The News and Sunday Globe (1805-1839)

People's Weekly Police Gazette (1835-1836)

Pictorial Times (1843-1848)

The Saint James's Chronicle (1801-1866)

The Sun / The Sun & Central Press (1801-1876)

There is a lot more that we have planned. We're exploring academic partnerships (we're already working closely with the recently-announced British Library/Alan Turing Institute data science project Living with Machines). We're aiming to do creative things with the data. We will be publishing blog posts, both about the content and about the decisions we're making on what gets digitised. We will be producing online guides and research tools, aimed at both the specialist and the general user.

We think that we have come up with a model for the digitisation of newspapers, in particular the way in which we are working in partnership with Findmypast, which will be particularly productive. We certainly hope to build on it beyond the life of the project. We can't show you any newspapers digitised through Heritage Made Digital, or offer any free datasets, as yet. But we will do soon.

It's worth remembering that the British Library has 60 million newspapers, from 1619 to the present day. After a decade or more of intensive work, we have digitised just 5%. There is a long, long way to go.

Posted by Luke McKernan at 10:08 AM

Tags

The general election that no one was supposed to want turned out to be completely compelling. Many of the apparent certainties on which the UK's snap election of June 2017 was based were overturned, at least in part - from its core themes (it was supposed to be about Brexit but never really was), to demographics (young people don't turn out to vote, except that they did), to the balance of political power (the predicted comprehensive victory by the Conservatives instead resulted in a hung parliament).

Tim Farron, then leader of the Liberal Democrats, from BBC News at Ten, 17 May 2017

One certainty that remained in place was the primary position of television as the platform for information and debate. Probably the defining image of modern electioneering is the politician speaking with a grouping of supporters with banners bunched behind them, the supposed audience seeing the back of the speaker while the true target is a remote one. Reality is subverted to televisual reality.

Although subsequent analysis of voting trends has shown that social media may have had a greater influence, in some sectors, than before, while newspapers' influence has not waned as greatly as some have pronounced (again, in particular sectors), television was where the general election was played out. One of the particular coups of the election campaign was when Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn changed his mind and decided to take part in a BBC party leaders' debate, wrong-footing the Conservative leader Theresa May. Likewise the performances by the various politicians in interviews (Theresa May telling The One Show about who in her household put out the bins), Jeremy Corbyn telling Jeremy Paxman on Channel 4 why he wasn't campaigning to abolish the monarchy) seem to have had a persuasive effect on public perceptions. Other media play their part, but television is the testing ground.

The British Library was recording all this, or at least a good part of it. Between the surprise announcement of the election on 18 April 2017 and election day on June 8 we recorded some 1,500 television news programmes from 15 channels (BBC One, BBC Two, BBC Four, BBC News, BBC Parliament, Channel 4, ITV1, Sky News, Al Jazeera English, CGTN, CNN, France 24, NHK World, RT, Channels 24). This included general news programmes from each of those channels, interviews, speeches, panel debates, party election broadcasts, satirical shows, and of course the through-the-night election results programmes and post-election reporting. Because of the surprise nature of the election, there weren't some of the in-depth documentaries and comedy series that we saw at the 2015 election and the 2016 EU referendum, but the air of improvisation as TV reacted to events only added to the compelling nature of those six weeks.

Because in the middle of the election were breaking news stories that halted the campaigning twice - the suicide bomber at the Manchester Arena on 22 May and the attacks on London Bridge and Borough Market on 3 June. Both events wove their way into the election narrative, and saw the broadcasters adapting to the abrupt shift in the news agenda. Extended recordings of the breaking news reportage on these events, across multiple channels, are also part of we archived.

George Osborne and Ed Balls, part of ITV's election night commentary team

All of our UK 2017 general election programmes are now on the Explore catalogue, and can be played directly from the I Want This links on the catalogue at either our London or Boston Spa sites. You can access the programme either directly from the catalogue, or you can go to our onsite Broadcast News service, and search in greater depth for programmes by date, channel or subject (to find Broadcast News, following the Sound & Moving Image services link from the front page of any British Library terminal).

We have produced a spreadsheet of all of the news and election programmes we recorded 18 April-11 June, in .xlsx format, which you can download here.

Our news collections go back to the 1620s, but they are as much about today as yesterday. It is not possible to archive the whole of the world of news as it impacts on the UK. The range of publications and platforms is too vast, and in an increasingly personalised news world, everyone is seeing different news. But we capture the best that we can - comprehensively for newspapers (thanks to Legal Deposit), reasonably comprehensively for web news sites (thanks to Non-Print Legal Deposit) and selectively for television and radio. It is instant history, turning what is live and uncertain into that which has become fixed and a subject for study and contemplation. And it is compelling.

Posted by Luke McKernan at 4:43 PM

Tags

The incoming US president, Donald Trump, is rewriting the book on the political process. However, despite the apparent creation of policy via social media, the real impact Trump has made since the presidential election process began has been through the more traditional media, particularly television. His statements made through Twitter have been picked up by newspapers, television and radio, and it is here that the seismic realignment of American political priorities is being digested and disseminated. Twitter has been used to ignite a media process. Social media remains for Donald Trump a means of being on TV, where his mass audience lies (Trump has 18.6m Twitter followers, but there are 114m television sets in the USA alone).

From the Sky News coverage of the US presidential election result, 09/11/2016

Trump's impact on television in Britain can be traced through the news and current affairs programmes recorded for the British Library's Broadcast News service. As well as recording regular television and radio news programmes each day from 22 UK and international channels, we have recorded numerous special programmes on Trump and the US election. On 8/9 November we recorded the election night programmes of BBC One, ITV1, Sky News, Al Jazeera English, CNN, RT (Russia Today), Channels 24 (Nigerian television) and CCTV (China). All of these can be found on our Explore catalogue with links to the playable programmes, which for copyright reasons can only be played on terminals at our London or Yorkshire sites. For ease of searching it is best, if you are onsite and using a British Library terminal, to go to the Broadcast News service itself (http://videoserver.bl.uk) and use the Advanced Search facility to select all recordings for 8/9 November 2016.

We also have many individual television programmes produced through 2016. of which the titles below are only a selection. They document not only the events of recent history, but the struggle that the often incredulous traditional media have had in trying to come to terms with the Trump phenomenon. The links are to our catalogue records, but again please note the programmes will only be playable on a British Library terminal. Descriptions in inverted commas are those provided for the programmes as part of the EPG (Electronic Programme Guide).

The Mad World of Donald Trump (Channel 4, tx. 26/01/2016): "Matt Frei enters the colourful and mad world of presidential hopeful Donald Trump, whose meteoric political rise comes amid one of the most controversial political campaigns America's seen."

President Trump: Can He Really Win? (Channel 4, tx. 30/03/2016): "Donald Trump has emerged as the clear front runner for the Republican Presidential nomination. Matt Frei investigates whether 'the Donald' could make it to the White House."

President Trump: Can He Really Win? (Channel 4, tx. 23/08/2016): "Matt Frei explores how the US presidential contest is shaping up to be one of the most brutal in living memory, and asks if Donald Trump can make it all the way to the White House."

Trump vs Clinton Live (Channel 4, tx. 27/09/2016): "US Presidential Debate: Channel 4 presents live coverage of the first of three US presidential debates, as Donald Trump goes head to head with Hillary Clinton."

Clinton v Trump: The Second Debate (Sky News, tx. 10/10/2016): "We join Sky News for coverage of the second presidential debate of the 2016 US Election between Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump."

Paxman on Trump v Clinton: Divided America (BBC One, tx. 17/10/2016): "Jeremy Paxman travels to Washington and beyond to understand how Americans came to face such unpopular choices in its candidates for the presidency."

US Presidential Debate (BBC News, tx. 20/1/2016): "Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump face each other in the final 2016 presidential debate at the University of Nevada in Las Vegas."

The World According to President Trump (Channel 4, tx. 12/11/2016): "What will a President Trump really do? Will he really ban all Muslims? Build a wall? Pal up to Putin? Smash Isis? Matt Frei speaks to the people who know."

Panorama: Trump's New America (BBC One, tx. 14/11/2-16): "Hilary Andersson meets angry Americans on both sides of the electoral race who feel disillusioned and disenfranchised by the electoral process."

Tags

The most tumultuous British news story since the British Library began recording television and radio news programmes in 2010 has undoubtedly been the EU referendum. The result of the vote made on 23 June 2016 is still causing shockwaves, and has generated a compelling archive. It is hard to calculate just how many hours of broadcasting we have archived since the date of the referendum was announced on 20 February 2016 that relate to the subject, but it will be somewhere between 2,500 and 3,000 hours of TV and radio. On June 24 alone, the day the result was announced, we recorded 135 hours.

The archive comprises regular and specialist news and current affairs programmes broadcast over February-June 2016, plus comedy programmes, broadcasts by the Vote Leave and Britain Stronger in Europe campaigns, interviews, live speeches, parliamentary debates, public debates and through-the-night coverage of the result of the vote. There are programmes from the BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Sky News, but also CNN, Al Jazeera English, RT (Russia Today), France 24, NHK World (Japan), CCTV (China), BBC national radio channels, LBC and more. In general the referendum saw the traditional news media providing the chief platform for the national discussion. There was considerable activity on the web and via social media, but print (often thought to be waning in influence at general elections) and particularly television were where the mass audience came for its information, and to see the arguments played out.

Programmes on Broadcast News

The archive is available already at the British Library, and continues to be added to each day. Every programme recorded up to the end of June can be found via Explore, or on our Sound and Moving Image catalogue (SAMI), though the programmes themselves can only be played onsite, at either our St Pancras or Boston Spa locations. Researchers onsite may find it easier to explore the archive via the Broadcast News service, which offers word-searching for subtitled programmes and filtering by date, date range, channel or medium (TV and radio). If you are using Explore, you should search by a programme title or terms such as 'referendum', 'Brexit', 'EU' etc, and filter the results by Moving Image or Audio. Clicking on the Details tab of any record will give you the description plus the link to the playable programme (which will only play onsite).

Below is a list of some of the key special programmes broadcast (the list mostly does not include programmes such as Newsnight, Question Time, Peston on Sunday, The Andrew Marr Show, Murnaghan, Pienaar's Politics, Today and Daily Politics, which we record on a regular basis in any case). The descriptions mostly come from EPG (Electronic Programme Guide).

2016 EU Referendum - selected special programmes, February-June 2016

Channel

Title

Date

Description

BBC News

BBC News

20/02/2016

Prime minister announces date of referendum

BBC 1

BBC News at Ten

20/02/2016

Includes news that EU agreement has been made, triggering UK referendum

BBC Parliament

Live EU referendum statement

22/02/2016

Live coverage of the statement in the House of Commons by prime minister David Cameron on the deal reached with EU leaders on reforms to the terms of the UK's membership

BBC1

Panorama Special: In or Out - The EU Referendum

22/02/2016

How much do you know about the EU? Nick Robinson debates immigration, jobs and sovereignty.

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum - George Osborne

23/03/2016

The speech by George Osborne in Bristol on the importance of staying in the EU alongside fellow cabinet ministers Liz Truss, Amber Rudd and Stephen Crabb, from Monday 18 April.

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum - Gordon Brown

23/03/2016

The speech on the reasons for Britain to remain in the EU made by former Labour prime minister Gordon Brown at a conference on the economic consequences of "Brexit", from 21 April.

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum - Michael Gove

23/03/2016

Recorded coverage of the speech by justice secretary Michael Gove on the case for leaving the European Union, from Tuesday 19 April.

Ranvir Singh travels to London, Lincolnshire, Lancashire and Greater Manchester to find out whether public perception of immigration is borne out by the facts.

BBC Parliament

Live House of Commons coverage

11/04/2016

Government statement on EU referendum leaflet

BBC2

Europe: Them or Us - part 1

12/04/2016

1/2. An Island Apart: Nick Robinson explores the troubled history of the UK's relationship with Europe.

BBC News

Victoria Derbyshire

14/04/2016

Includes Jeremy Corbyn speech on EU referendum

BBC Parliament

Alastair Darling EU Speech

18/04/2016

Recorded coverage of former Labour chancellor Alistair Darling making a speech setting out the economic argument for the UK to remain in the European Union, from Friday 15 April.

BBC Parliament

Boris Johnson EU Speech

18/04/2016

Recorded coverage of London mayor Boris Johnson making a speech at a Vote Leave event in Manchester calling on the UK to leave the European Union, from Friday 15 April.

BBC2

Newsnight

18/04/2016

Referendum special on the economy

BBC Parliament

Vote Leave Event

18/04/2016

Recorded coverage of Labour MP and Vote Leave Chair, Gisela Stuart, making a speech entitled The Risks of Staying in the European Union, from Wednesday 13 April.

BBC2

Europe: Them or Us - part 2

19/04/2016

2/2. Voice of the People: The troubled history of the UK's relationship with Europe. Episode two goes behind the closed doors of Whitehall and Brussels.

BBC News

HARDtalk

19/04/2016

The battle for Britain's future, in or out of the EU, will be settled in June. Stephen Sackur's guest is Tim Martin, founder of JD Wetherspoon. Could Brexit make economic sense?

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum - Boris Johnson

10/05/2016

Recorded coverage of the speech by Conservative MP and leave campaigner Boris Johnson on the 'liberal cosmopolitan' case for Britain leaving the European Union, from Monday 9 May

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum - David Cameron

10/05/2016

Recorded coverage of David Cameron's speech on the forthcoming EU referendum, warning that peace in Europe could be at risk if Britain votes to leave the EU. From Monday 9 May

BBC2

Newsnight

16/05/2016

An EU referendum special with Evan Davis

Channel 4

Channel 4 News

17/05/2016

Includes EU referendum debate with members of UK minority communities

BBC1

Paxman in Brussels: Who Really Rules Us?

19/05/2016

As the EU referendum debate approaches its climax, Jeremy Paxman takes viewers on a journey to the heart of Europe, meeting the movers, shakers and anonymous faces who run the EU.

Channel 4

Referendum Campaign Broadcast

23/05/2016

A referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign

Channel 4

Referendum Campaign Broadcast

24/05/2016

A referendum campaign broadcast by the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign

Channel 4

Boris v Dave: The Battle for Europe

25/05/2016

Michael Crick examines how the EU referendum campaign has become a personal battle between David Cameron and Boris Johnson; a battle that will define the future of the country

BBC1

How Should I Vote? The EU Debate

26/05/2016

Live from Glasgow, Victoria Derbyshire hosts a debate on the issues that matter to younger voters ahead of the June referendum on whether or not Britain should remain in the EU.

BBC Parliament

Business Views on EU Referendum Committee

27/05/2016

Recorded coverage of the Business, Innovation and Skills committee on the views of businesses on the EU referendum, from Tuesday 24 May.

BBC Parliament

EU Polls Debate

28/05/2016

Recorded coverage of an event with pollsters and commentators asking whether the EU referendum polls can be relied on. From Wednesday 25 May.

BBC Parliament

Scotland and the EU Referendum Committee

28/05/2016

The Scottish Affairs Committee's session on the impact of the EU referendum on Scotland, from Wednesday 25 May.

BBC Parliament

Speaker's EU Debate

28/05/2016

Recorded coverage of the House of Commons speaker hosting a debate on the UK's membership of the European Union. From Monday 23 May.

BBC1

Countryfile

29/05/2016

Snowdonia: John Craven races a hill runner to the summit of Snowdon and meets the volunteers protecting the area's ospreys. Includes David Cameron and Boris Johnson speaking on EU referendum and the countryside.

Channel 4

An Immigrant's Guide to Britain

30/05/2016

Comedian Henning Wehn and his gang of first-generation immigrants provide an irreverent guide to life in Britain. This episode explores caravans, rugby, the weather and more. (Ep1/3)

A European referendum campaign broadcast from the Britain Stronger in Europe campaign. Featuring Stephen Hawking

BBC1

The Andrew Neil Interviews: Leave or Remain?

08/06/2016

Andrew Neil speaks to the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne MP. Then BBC News.

Channel 4

Referendum Campaign Broadcast

09/06/2016

A European referendum campaign broadcast by the Vote Leave campaign.

ITV

The ITV Referendum Debate

09/06/2016

Two-hour live debate ahead of the most significant UK referendum in recent history. Three senior political figures from each side answer questions from members of the audience. Nicola Sturgeon, Angela Eagle and Amber Rudd speak for Remain; Boris Johnson, Gisela Stuart and Andrea Leadsom speak for Leave.

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum Campaign - Blair and Major

10/06/2016

Recorded coverage of the EU referendum campaign event in Northern Ireland, with former prime ministers John Major and Tony Blair backing the UK to remain in the European Union.

BBC Parliament

EU Referendum Campaign - Gove and Raab

10/06/2016

Recorded coverage of the EU referendum campaign event with Michael Gove and Dominic Raab on why the UK should leave the European Union, from Wednesday 8 June.

BBC1

The Andrew Neil Interviews: Leave or Remain?

10/06/2016

Andrew Neil talks to leading campaigners on both sides of the EU referendum debate. In this programme he speaks to Ukip leader, Nigel Farage MEP. Then BBC News.

Recorded coverage of Boris Johnson announcing that he will not stand in the election to become the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Thursday 30 June.

BBC Parliament

Conservative Leadership - Stephen Crabb

30/06/2016

Recorded coverage of work and pensions secretary Stephen Crabb launching his campaign to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Wednesday 29 June.

BBC Parliament

Conservative Leadership - Theresa May

30/06/2016

Recorded coverage of home secretary Theresa May launching her campaign to be the next leader of the Conservative Party, from Thursday 30 June.

BBC News

HARDtalk

30/06/2016

Stephen Sackur talks to Segolene Royal, French environment minister and former socialist candidate for the French presidency about the British Brexit.

BBC 1

Question Time

30/06/2016

Topical debate in which guests from the worlds of politics and the media answer questions posed by members of the public

BBC R5L

Question Time Extra Time

30/06/2016

John Pienaar introduces coverage of Question Time, with the chance to continue the debate after the simulcast.

Sky News

The Pledge: Brexit

30/06/2016

This week on The Pledge it's a Brexit special. There will be straight talking debate on the UK's historic vote to leave the EU.

As said, we continue to record programmes relating to the aftermath of the referendum, as well as our regular news programming - some 40 hours per day. We will aim to upload new programmes to SAMI and Explore at the end of each month, but those who want up-to-the-minute recordings can always go direct to the Broadcast News service, which makes most of the programmes it records available an hour or so after broadcast. To access Broadcast News onsite, go to any British Library terminal, and click on the front page link for Sound and Moving Image services.

The British Library has also been archiving websites on the EU Referendum, as outlined in this blog from our Web Archiving team: Capturing and Preserving the EU Referendum Debate (Brexit). And of course we have been taking in most British newspapers as part of our standard Legal Deposit intake.

Meanwhile, the recording goes on ....

Recording today's news

Posted by Luke McKernan at 2:41 PM

Tags

It's time for another edition in our occasional series on news about news, the St Pancras Intelligencer. Here are some of the recent stories on where news and where it might be going which have caught our eye.

Google's Accelerated Mobile Pages Project

Death to the Mass - Jeff Jarvis writes on the death of the traditional idea of the mass media as delivering the same content to everyone. What replaces it will be tailored to the individual, who is now the king over everything:

What has died is the mass-media business model â injuring, perhaps mortally, a host of institutions it symbiotically supported: publishing, broadcasting, mass marketing, mass production, political parties, possibly even our notion of a nation. We are coming at last to the end of the Gutenberg Age.

A neighbor is better than a newspaper - A rather heartening report from Solutions Journalism Network, showing how the oldest form of news distribution - word-of-mouth - operates in rural Western mountain communities in the USA.

Tags

Did you know that the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised by online publishers and that these are all available for free in British Library Reading Rooms? With the recent addition of the Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday to the digital archives you can search at the British Library, itâs a good opportunity to review whatâs available for all current British nationals.

The Times was the first national newspaper to digitise its historic back run and The Times Digital Archive has been available in British Library Reading Rooms since 2003. This is a vast archive which allows users to search every page of the newspaper from its first issue in 1785 (when it was known as the Daily Universal Register) up to 2010.

The archive offers access to a 225 year back run of The Times and contains, in total, over 70,000 issues which include over 1.6 million pages or more than 11.8 million articles. The entire file is searchable by keyword and by date and the content can be viewed at page or article level. In addition there is an advanced search facility which enables a search to be focussed on particular parts of the newspaper such as âNewsâ or âReviewsâ or âPoliticsâ.

In the years since 2003, when The Times Digital Archive first became available, back runs of most of the other currently published British national newspapers have been digitised and these are all available in British Library Reading Rooms. The titles are:

Daily Express: 1900 to date, and Sunday Express: 2000 to date

Daily Mail: 1896-2004

Daily Mirror: 1903 to date

Daily Star/ Star on Sunday: 2000 to date

Daily Telegraph: 1855-2000 and Sunday Telegraph: 1961-2000

Financial Times: 1888-2010

Guardian: 1824 -2003

Independent: 1986-2012, and Independent on Sunday: 1990-2012

Observer: 1791-2003

Scotsman: 1870-1950

The Times: 1785-2010, and Sunday Times 1822-2006

Links to all of these can be via our Electronic Resources page (select Newspapers as a subject, then refine your search by Full Text). Please note that electronic access only works in British Library Reading Rooms and on our terminals.

Although the historic back runs of most of the British national newspapers that are published today have been digitised and made available online, not every current British national is available in this way. The following titles do not yet have digital archives:

Daily Record

i

Morning Star

People

The Sun

Sample search on the Telegraph Historical Archive

The most recent additions to the list of digitised archives of British national newspapers are The Daily Telegraph, Sunday Telegraph, Independent and Independent on Sunday. These titles have only been available on our Reading Rooms since earlier this year.

The Telegraph Historical Archive contains over 1 million facsimile pages of The Daily Telegraph from the first issue published in 1855 to the year 2000 and the Sunday Telegraph from its inception in 1961 up to 2012.

The Independent Digital Archive contains approximately 750,000 facsimile pages and includes every issue of The Independent from 1986 to 2012 and every issue of The Independent on Sunday from its inception in 1990 up to 2012.

In some cases it is possible to carry out a combined search of more than one historic newspaper archive which can increase the efficiency of the search process and deliver a wider range of results from different types of newspaper. The historic archives of The Times, Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Financial Times, Independent and Independent on Sunday are all hosted by the same on-line publisher (Gale Cengage) and these archives can be searched individually or in a combination of two or more titles. Similarly, the historic archives of the Daily Express, Daily Mirror, Daily Star, Sunday Express and Star on Sunday are hosted by another on-line publisher (UKpressonline), and the archives of The Guardian and The Scotsman (along with the Irish Times) are hosted by ProQuest Historical Newspapers. It is possible to combine a search of two or more newspapers within these groups of titles as well.

Digital newspaper archives have transformed the use of historic newspapers in research. Whereas in the past it might have taken days, weeks or even months to search through large bound volumes of newspapers or to trawl through endless reels of microfilm to find all the information needed for a particular research topic, in a digital archive the information is much more easily accessible and can often be found in almost no time at all.

Stephen Lester, Newspaper Curator

Posted by Luke McKernan at 11:18 AM

Tags

The news that The Independent and The Independent on Sundayare to close down, and the spin-off newspaper i to be sold off to Johnston Press, has led to much discussion about the future of newspapers. Is the decision to cease print and develop the independent.co.uk website a sign of the death of print newspapers? Was The Independent squeezed out of the market and hence a failure, or is the shift to web-only a timely strategic move, supported by growing use of what is apparently a profitable website, which other newspapers will inevitably follow in turn? Can a newspaper brand survive when it no longer has a newspaper?

Here at the British Library we have seen many newspapers come and go. We take in 1,400 newspaper publications of one sort or another every week, but we have some 35,000 newspaper titles listed on our catalogue. A lot of newspapers have ceased publication over the past 400 years, and The Independent is merely the latest. But the gradual transference of a news industry from print to digital has major implications for what we collect in this area, and how. It is something that we are studying closely.

At present we acquire newspapers in print form. We would like to acquire more newspapers digitally, and newspapers today are produced in digital form (PDF usually) from which the print copy is then generated. But these digital copies are not published as such, consequently they do not qualify as 'publications' and cannot be collected under Legal Deposit. Of course some newspapers are available in digital facsimile form on their websites, which we could collect via our web archiving operation, but the PDFs that are available are of lower image quality (less suitable for preservation), and there is a shrinking number of these, as newspapers turn instead to aggregation services such as PageSuite to deliver their digital copies for them.

So why not just archive the websites? They have the same content as the newspapers, don't they? Well, no they don't. We recently conducted a study in regional newspapers and their web equivalents, to see how similar content was between the two forms. We found that the typical UK regional newspaper, in any one week, had roughly 40% of stories unique to print, 15% unique to online, and 45% that the forms shared (we looked only at news editorial, not advertising, arts coverage or sport). Some newspapers are closer to their web equivalents than others, but in general the two forms are not the same, and are diverging all the more.

Analysis of stories published by selected UK regional weekly newspapers

Nevertheless, we are archiving the websites. Since 2013, when non-print Legal Deposit legislation was introduced, enabling the British Library and the other Legal Deposit libraries in the UK and Ireland to start archiving the UK Web, we have been gathering in UK news sites. And whereas we archive most UK sites once a year, for news sites we are archiving them on an either daily or weekly basis. It's not just newspaper sites, however - we are capturing web-only news sites, community journalism sites (hyperlocals), news broadcasters' sites, news parody sites and more. We have 1,800 on our list so far, and we are still adding titles. It's not easy to keep track of all of the UK news sites, because there is no definitive list. The numbers keep shifting. Publications such as Benn's Media Directory keep a track of registered news publications on an annual basis, and the handy Local Web List database tries to identify all of the self-produced community journalism sites out there, but, frankly, trying to keep the Web in bibliographic order is like herding ants.

All newspapers and other serial publications in the UK are assigned a unique identifier, the ISSN (similar to the ISBN for books). The ISSN underpins the collecting of newspapers under Legal Deposit in this country, not least because it is key to issuing barcodes. So it is that we manage to keep track with nearly every UK newspaper as it is published.

The problem is that websites don't need barcodes. There is no operational ID system for pinpointing a news site, beyond knowing the URL, and that doesn't help when it comes to keeping track of all different variants, spin-offs (blogs, microsites etc) and other changes that a news site and its digital family may go through. And how do you define what a news website is in any case, if you start to include blogs, hyperlocals, forums and so on?

Then there is the problem of referring to 'news websites', as though capturing these through archiving would be the answer. Newspapers were once the sole form in which printed journalism appeared. Today, newspapers have become apps. News is produced by publishers across diverse platforms which draw their material from content management systems. A newspaper is one such output; a website another; a mobile application another. To build the news archive of the future, we might need to think less of capturing print or digital publications, and more about preserving the engines that have generated them (and the digital content fed into such engines). Then we could generate how the news looked to anyone at a particular place and point in time, according to the applications and devices that would have been available to them.

And that highlights another problem for the future archiving of news. A newspaper is predicated on the understanding that all who purchase it will share in the same news. They might have differing opinions about that news, yet they still share in it.

But news is not like that anymore. News is tailored to the individual, who has increasing editorial control over what news matters to them, as our news content strategy notes. Twitter feeds, Facebook news aggregation, multiple TV news channels, all put the selection of news in the hands of the consumer (even if the algorithms of Facebook and Google do much of that tailoring for us). No one sees the same news any more. This is why the archiving of Twitter is such a conundrum. There is no one Twitter out there - everyone's experience of it is different. How are we to recreate such an experience, to make our future news archives valid?

Theorising over the nature of news is all very interesting, but we have to make practical decisions to ensure that we archive newspapers, their digital derivatives and competitors in a multimedia news market, as thoroughly and efficiently as we can. We continue to take in most UK newspapers in print, and we are close to doing the same with news websites. We archive TV and radio news, albeit selectively. It would help a lot if we knew if and when newspapers are to disappear, but no one does.

Every newspaper has had a very good run ... It's coming to an end as a result of these disruptive technologies ... I think we will have both [internet and print news] for quite a while, certainly ten years, some people say five. I'd be more inclined to say 20, but 20 means very small circulations.

And that could be it. Newspapers will last a generation. It may not be an even decline, because what applies to the nationals is not necessarily the same as the regionals. The UK's national newspapers, of which there are around 30, attract a particular kind of advertiser and have the potential to reach out internationally (which is what The Independent's owners are pinning their hopes upon). For regional newspapers, of which there are around 100 dailies and 1,200 weeklies, there seems to be a different model operating, one where local advertising combined with consumer loyalty may keep some titles in print for a good while yet, even as the same titles increase their digital foothold (the recent ranking of UK media publications for 2015 by SimilarWeb shows regional publisher like Kentonline, Birmingham Mail and Liverpool Echo among those titles with the highest percentage of mobile traffic share).

However long it takes, time is running out for print newspapers. It will be our job to ensure that we continue to serve the needs of UK research by increasingly gathering news in its digital forms. We need a smooth transition, with consistency of representation. The challenge is that the mechanisms to do so are not fully in place as yet. The technologies are; the means to ensure capture, identification and continuity are not. But we're working on it.

Posted by Luke McKernan at 6:28 PM

Tags

The bicentenary of the battle of Waterloo is upon us, and of the many books, programmes and articles currently published about the event, one of the most novel and fasincating is Brian Cathcart's history The News from Waterloo. This tells not the story of the battle but of the race to report the news in Britain, and in doing so it tells us a lot about the transmission and understanding of news in the past, and the world of news we enjoy today.

The 11:00 am 'Waterloo' edition of The Times, 22 June 1815.

The battle itself took place on Sunday 18 June 1815, ending somewhere between 9 and 10 that evening. The British public, however, did not start to receive certain news of the outcome of the battle (nor indeed confirmation that any such battle had taken place) until the very end of Wednesday 21 June, with the London newspapers reporting the story from the morning of the 22nd.

The reasons for this delay were several, and in describing them Cathcart gives an excellent and accessible account of how newspapers operated in the early nineteenth century. To begin with, there were no journalists at Waterloo. Newspapers in Britain at that time did not have journalists as we would understand them; there were parliamentary reporters (a recent innovation after government had finally conceded to the reporting of its affairs), there was an editor who would write the editorial, and there was much gathering of content from other sources, such as official sources - foreign news was generally channeled through the Post Office, as a means of exercising governmental control over reporting such dangerous information.

Government exercised control over newspapers through law (particularly libel laws) and through taxation, which had the effect of narrowing down the number of people who might read a newspaper because of the cost, and hopefully keeping the news out of the hands of the masses. This only worked so far, because newspapers were nevertheless distributed widely, borrowed, made available in reading rooms, inns and coffee houses, and read aloud in groups. But the high cost meant a restricted buying public, and together with the mechanical limitations of newspaper production of the time kept down the number of copies published - The Times sold around 7,000 copies a day in 1815.

News travelled slowly, though it was speeding up. The mechanical or optical telegraph, which worked by replaying signals from high vantage points, meant that messages could travel quickly over long distances, and it awakened in people a sense of news being able to be communicated to them far more quickly. However, the telegraph was expensive to maintain and it didn't work in the dark. Extraordinarily such problems led to the British closing down their telegraph operation shortly before Waterloo, so the only way to get the news to the British public was by road and water.

Cathcart's book entertainingly describes how news false and true made its way to London from Waterloo, causing much confusion among a public desperate to know if Napoleon had been defeated, as accounts of the battles that took place the day before Waterloo were muddled up with the battle on the 28th, communicated by private individuals who brought over scraps of information on what they thought had happened. (See his blog post for the British Newspaper Archive for a summary of these unofficial reports.) The official dispatch, which Wellington completed writing around noon on June 23, was mysteriously delayed while its bearer, Major Henry Percy, was travelling through the Netherlands. It then got held up crossing the Channel when the wind dropped, so that Percy ended up having to get into a rowing boat, before completing his journey by post-chaise. Finally the official dispatch was delivered in London around 11:15 pm on Wednesday 21 June, not a moment too soon for the newspapers laboriously to remake some type and to publish an account for the morning editions.

There were an estimated 56 newspapers published in London at this time, from dailies to weeklies. The leading titles were The Times, The Courier, The Morning Post andThe Morning Chronicle. This was a time before there were press directories with lists of all newspaper titles published, but in the British Library collection we have just under 300 British newspaper titles from 1815, with some 40 of them published in London. So it is not every newspaper that was published. Cathcart has done a remarkable job piecing together the complex narrative of what was published when over 18-22 June 1815, noting where a newspaper issued more than one edition with more war information, but bemoaning the fact (on his website) that "Superb though it is, the British Library collection is nothing like complete for 1815." Well, there's a reason for that.

In 1815 there was no national newspaper collection. The Stamp Office took in a copy of every newspaper published (part of the taxation regime designed to keep the newspapers in line), retaining these for a period of two years before disposing of them. It was only in 1823 that copies published in London started to be transferred to the British Museum, with regional newspapers following after 1832, and not until 1869 were newspaper deposited directly with the Museum.

So for newspapers in 1815 we are dependent on private collections acquired subsequently, and inevitably there are gaps in the surviving record. Moreover, the British Museum and then the British Library have always collected just one edition of a newspaper per day, for practical reasons of space. We do not have, and cannot have, everything. Different editions of an historical newspaper on a single day are therefore quite a rarity (indeed most titles in 1815 only produced a single edition), existing usually on the few occasions where the same title was acquired from different collectors.

From page 3 of The Times, 22 June 1815, via The Times Digital Archive, summarising information on Waterloo learned from the official dispatch.

Fortunately 22 June 1815 is one date when there are some different timed editions available. The early edition of The Times for that day had the above notice, noting that the official dispatch had been received and summarising its contents. It is this version of the newspaper that can be found online via the Times Digital Archive (subscription access only, freely available in British Library reading rooms). The copy in the British Library is of the second edition, issued at 11:00 am that day. For this the second page of the 4-page newspaper had been entirely remade to accommodate the Duke of Wellington's complete dispatch. The full two pages are illustrated at the top of this post; the start of dispatch on page 2 is below, alongside the earlier page 2 from the version on the Times Digital Archive:

From page 2 of the The Times, 22 June 1815, early morning edition on left (via Times Digital Archive), 11:00 am edition on the right (from British Library collection), with the official dispatch from Waterloo reproduced on the right-hand column.

The dispatch had first been published in The London Gazette, which was a government publication issuing official information, and which is still in operation today (as The Gazette). The Waterloo 'extraordinary' edition of The London Gazette is freely available online, and this is the front page:

The London Gazette, 22 June 1815, via www.thegazette.co.uk. Wellington's official dispatch did not reveal the information that the battle had been won until halfway down the second column of the second page.

Once The London Gazette had been published, the other London newspapers plundered the official text for their own editions, and then gradually the information spread over the nation as mail coaches carried the news to every corner over the next few days (Edinburgh, for example, received the information on Saturday 24 June).

Today we may marvel at a time when the news of a major battle took three days to get from Waterloo to London, with part of the journey undertaken by rowing boat. We live in a world of constantly breaking news, where tweets or other electronic alerts informs us of news happening even before it is news (if we define news as something which has been composed after a period of time with an understanding of the context of the story, and with checks made to verify it). News has become instantaneous. Moreover news is cheap, for the most part free (in the UK) from governmental interference, and created by legions of journalists.

Yet in some ways the news archive we are creating for 2015 will be as problematic for future historians as 1815 is for us today. We are not keeping every edition of every newspaper published on any one day. More than that the news has now spread over so many different media and platforms that it lies beyond anyone's ability to capture it all. Still more problematically, we are failing to capture the experience of news today. Increasingly we are finding our news online, but web archives can only operate as snapshots, capturing how a web pages looked at a particular point in time.

Most of the websites that we archive are crawled just once a year, but for news websites we archive these on a daily or weekly basis. Yet not only will stories fall between the cracks (i.e. they may disappear from a site between one archive capture and the next), but the experience of the flow of news is lost. There is nothing in web archiving - as yet - that can capture the experience of seeing news being reported as it happens, as we experience through ever-changing Twitter feeds or through the increasingly-popular live blogs on news websites (and the British Library does not currently archive social media, except on a very selective basis). News is increasingly tailored to our individual interests - we may each of us see a different news. News is now an endless succession of ever-changing editions; but as archivists we still capture it as a single instance, as though it were still a thing on paper, to be published just once a day.

The endless flow of news - the live #Waterloo200 Twitter feed at 18:36, 18 June 2015

In 1815 we see the news almost overwhelming the mechanisms that were put in place to communicate it. The need to know outstripped the means to satisfy it. That led to new technologies. In 1814 The Times had introduced a steam-driven press, which would transform the rate at which newspapers could be printed. The arrival of the railways greatly spread how newspapers could be distributed, and the electric telegraph (the first working system of which was demonstrated in 1816) collapsed the distances between places worldwide. The invention of steam ships put an end to becalmed sailing ships holding up the news from overseas.

In 2015 we again see the overwhelming nature of the news. There is so much news available that services like Facebook must now filter it for us, telling us what they think we need to know. We cannot capture everything, yet we must strive always to capture something, and trust in the ingenuity of historians such as Brian Cathcart to fill in the gaps in the archive as they find it. History is not made by the evidence; it is a product of the reasoned imagination.

Where to find British newspapers from 1815:

British Library - most surviving British newspapers for 1815 are held by the British Library and can be accessed by anyone with a Reader's pass at either of our sites (St Pancras, London and Boston Spa, Yorkshire)

British Newspaper Archive - the subscription website based on digitised newspapers from the British Library's collection has 48 titles for 1815, four of them London titles (Morning Chronicle, Morning Post, The Examiner, Cobbett's Weekly Political Register)

The Gazette - the full run of the London Gazette from 1665 (when it was the Oxford Gazette) to the present day can be found for free on its site

Tags

Times are hard in the news industry, as all will know, and this applies to the news curator's blog as well. It just hasn't proved possible to keep up the weekly production of our St Pancras Intelligencer round-up of the week's news about news which ran for most of 2014. But we're unwilling to see a good title die, so the Intelligencer is making its tentative return as a monthly (or thereabouts). Here's hoping the strategy is a successful one - and let's kick things off again with the news about news in January.

The Future of News - There have been many reports on the future of news, and the latest comes from BBC head of news James Harding. He argues that

in the internet age, the BBC is more necessary and valuable than ever. The internet is not keeping everyone informed, nor will it: it is, in fact, magnifying problems of information inequality, misinformation, polarisation and disengagement. Our job is keeping everyone informed.

He says the BBC must increase both its local and global coverage and improve its digital services, and it's the increase in local coverage that has excited the most comment from the local newspaper world, which feels threatened by the BBC's reach at a time of shrinking newspaper titles and shrinking revenues.

Emily Bell's 2015 Hugh Cudlipp lecture - Also on the future of news and journalism was this lecture by Emily Bell, the director of Columbia Universityâs Tow Centre for digital journalism, in which calls for social networks and journalists to work together.

We are seeing unimaginably large new entities, which get their size from publishing not just a selected number of stories but everything in the world. Social networks and search engines are the masters of this universe. As we see the disappearance of print as a significant medium, and the likely decline of broadcast television, the paths our stories and journalism must travel down to reach readers and viewers are being shaped by technologies beyond our control.

The answer, she argues, is for more journalists who a more technically proficient, and for social networks and search engines to hire more technologists who are understand the news.

Because at the moment we have a situation which is not working for either of us. Those of us engaged with what journalism is and will be, who have a direct and vested interest in the protection of free speech and standards for information have a lot to do, and we need to work together, because we are now part of one continuous global information loop.

'Muslim-controlled' UK city claim mocked by #FoxNewsFacts hashtag - Much joy was brought by the Twitter hashtag #FoxNewsFacts following Fox News terrorism expert Steve Emerson's bold statement that there were no-go zones in Europe where "non-Muslims just simply donât go", among them Birmingham. Tweets along the lines of "Mecca Bingo, probable proof of the Islamic domination of Birmingham" and "Spaghetti Junction was specifically designed to make sure all roads lead to Mecca" brought some gaiety to dark times. The Poke gathered a selection of the best of them.

Watch out for @Bellingcat - An interview on Columbia Journalism Review with British blogger Eliot Higgins (previously known as Brown Moses), whose citizen investigative journalism website Bellingcat feature closely-analysed evidence from social media, YouTube and data sources of stories such as the MH17 crash.

Vice News debuts 'virtual reality news broadcast' of US Millions March - Online news broadcaster Vice News demonstrated a possible advance in news broadcasting when it teamed up with digital artist Chris Milk and filmmaker Spike Jonze for a âvirtual reality news broadcastâ filmed at the Millions March protest rally at the death of Eric Garner in New York. The 360-degree view film followed Vice News correspondent Alice Speri through the march in December. It's available via the VRSE app for iPhone and Android devices.

The British Library's newspaper collection as it was little more than a year ago (in Colindale) and as it is now (in Boston Spa)

Into the void - The British Library officially opened the National Newspaper Building, its new home for the UK's newspaper archives at Boston Spa in Yorkshire. Our blog post takes a look inside the building's storage void and traces the journey from Colindale to Boston Spa for the 60 million volumes held in the nation's newspaper archive.

Tags

Our television and radio news recording service, Broadcast News, has been busy over the past two months recording extra programmes on the Scottish independence referendum. Usually Broadcast News takes in some 60 hours of programmes per day (40 TV, 20 radio) from across 22 channels available via Freeview or Freesat. We record the same programmes at the same times each day, to provide a consistent research service. But when there are news specials, breaking news programmes or major news stories that spill over the schedules, then we record more.

The Big, Big Debate, BBC1 tx 11 September 2014

For the Scottish referendum we added recordings from two further channels, BBC One Scotland and STV, for most of August through to the end of September. So, as well as the standard TV and radio news programmes from BBC, ITV, Sky, Channel 4, Al Jazeera, CNN, LBC and others, we recorded BBC one Scotland's Reporting Scotland and Kevin Bridges: Live at the Referendum, STV's STV News at Six and Scotland Tonight, BBC Parliament's Scotland 2014 and Reporting Scotland, special programmes such as the Salmond/Darling dates, referendum broadcasts from the Yes and No campaigns, Radio's 1's Big Conversation: Scotland Decides (16 Sep), STV's Scotland Decides - The Facebook Debate (12 Sep), BBC 1's The Big Big Debate (11 Sep), and several more.

The heaviest extra recording activity was inevitably over 18 September (the day of the referendum) and the the results and aftermath the following day. BBC TV broadcast two through-the-night programmes entitled Scotland Decides: one hosted by Hugh Edwards for BBC1 and one for BBC Scotland hosted by Glenn Campbell. Bernard Ponsonby and Aasmah Mir hosted ITV/STV's coverage, also named Scotland Decides. Sky News went with Decision Time Scotland, hosted by Adam Boulton, Kay Burley and Niall Paterson. For radio, BBC Radio 4 went through the night with Scotland Decides, hosted by James Naughtie and Rachel Burden, while BBC World Service had a special edition of its The Newsroom programme.

Not watched by so many people in the UK, but fascinating for their different perspectives, were the special programmes produced by France 24, RT (Russia Today) and CNN, the latter two broadcasting coverage throughout the night and early morning, evidence of the huge interest the referendum generated worldwide. Steering clear of value judgments, it was nevertheless most intriguing to see how international opinion ranged from disbelief that Scotland would ever consider breaking away from the United Kingdom, to incredulity that it would ever consider not doing so having been given the opportunity. They are among the most interesting programmes from referendum night, and likely to be of particular value to future researchers.

The result itself brought about a mixture of triumph, disappointment, and even a sense of anticlimax, as we know. Sally Magnusson hosted BBC One Scotland programmes which analysed the results overthe morning and afternoon of September 19th, STV had John MacKay and Andrea Brymer hosting Scotland This Morning: How the Nation Voted. And then gradually the dust settled, the story dropped from the news agenda, and we returned to the regular round of news recordings, carrying on with our BBC One Scotland and STV recordings to the end of September. Now normality reigns, until the next drama unfolds.

All of the Scottish referendum programmes that we recorded are available to view (or listen to) at the British Library's St Pancras and Boston Spa sites via the instant access Broadcast News service.